ZOO-Kernel is the heart of the ZOO-Project WPS platform. It is a WPS compliant implementation written in C language which provides a powerful and extensible WPS server.

ZOO-Kernel is an extensible WPS server that makes your system more
powerful. It provides a full-featured processing engine which runs on
Linux, Mac OSX ™ and Windows ™ operating
systems. ZOO-Kernel is a CGI program which works on common web servers
(namely Apache or IIS ™). It can be seamlessly integrated to
new or existing web platforms.

ZOO-Kernel lets you process geospatial or non geospatial data using
well formed WPS requests. The WPS server is able to manage and chain
WPS Services (see ZOO-Services for examples) by loading dynamic
libraries and source code written in different programming languages.

The ZOO-Kernel rely on simple principles and tends to ease the
implementation of new services by sharing similar data structures for
every supported programming languages. The ZOO-Kernel is responsible
to parse the requests it receives and return the corresponding WPS
response.

In case of an Execute request, the ZOO-Kernel stores informations in
a basic KVP data structure for the programming language used to
implement the service, dynamically load the Service Provider defined
in the zcfg file and run a specific function corresponding to the
service, passing three arguments. Once the function return, ZOO-Kernel
knows if the service run succeessfuly or failed by checking the
returned value. In the case it succeeded, the ZOO-Kernel then parse
the third arguments containing the result and produce the output in
the desired format.

ZOO-Kernel is a polyglot. The software is written in a valid form
of multiple programming languages, which performs the same operations
independent of the programming language used to compile or interpret
it. The supported programming languages are listed bellow: